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Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Plank Wall | Bedroom Project

We have slowly been decorating our bedroom throughout the last year or so and we finally have an almost finished product. We just need to hang some things on the wall and then we will be complete!

Here is a little time lapse of how our bedroom came to be. We bought a kingsize bed, then a yellow rug that we ended up putting in the living room, then we bought a headboard and made night stands, then we switched out the lamps and added a new rug. We lived with that for a while before we started this project.

So back to our project, I knew I wanted some sort of accent wall behind our bed. We bought our headboard from Pottery Barn and I love it, but it is really dark so I wanted something white behind the bed. We explored our options for a while and decided on a DIY plank wall. We started by buying a 1/4" sheet of Plywood that was 4 feet by 8 feet that we had cut down while we were at Home Depot. Since the board was only 1/4" thick, it was the exact thickness of the trim already in our room so we did not have to worry about redoing the trim at all. It created a seamless look. We had Home Depot cut the wood into 6" strips that were then 8 feet long. Based on our wall size, we calculated that we would need 4 pieces of plywood.

Our wall is roughly 12 feet wide and almost 9 feet tall. Since our boards were only 8 feet long, we needed about one and a half boards for each row. We created a pattern that we repeated every three rows. The first row was an 8 foot board plus a 4 foot board. Next row was a 4 foot board plus an 8 foot board. The next row was a 2 foot board plus an 8 foot board plus another 2 foot board. We then repeated that pattern all the way down the wall. The first step we took once home was to find the studs and mark them all the way down the wall.

Next, we followed our pattern adding one board at a time. We just used a finishing nailer to attach the boards, but we later realized we should have used glue along the edges of the boards because they bow out a little bit. Richard ended up going back through and gluing down the edges. Also, we used pennies to create equal space between all of the boards. We wanted there to be a visible space between boards so it did not end up just looking like one solid piece of wood.

We continued down the wall until we got to the outlets at the bottom. Richard had to notch out holes in the boards for the two outlets we had to plank around. We just sort of winged it and figured it out as we went and it worked out. The one strip of wood looks different because that piece of plywood was significantly lighter for some reason.

After we were completely done planking the wall, we then painted the wood white to match the trim. Then we painted the rest of the room a blue/grey color. I love the color we picked out. It is subtle, but in person it is obviously blue without being too overwhelming. Here are some before and after pictures! I love the result and all the work we have put in to this room to make it exactly what I envisioned. Now we just need some wall decor.